Monday, 8 October 2018

On 30th September, we celebrated Fedora Women's day in RIT, Islampur, Dist. Sangli, Maharashtra, India. We (Amita, Nikhil and me) started early in the morning from Red Hat office and reached college at 12.30pm where we met the faculty(Savita Patil, Gautami Singhan) who were already waiting for us. As it was a long journey we just took a quick refreshing break and had lunch after that where we had conversation with the faculty members about various topics like how they have changed their syllabus, initiatives taken to introduce students to Open Source world and about Fedora Women Day. After lunch we headed to the room where we were going to organize the event.

Students were already there, and it was good to see around 30 girls student in the room, as it was Fedora Women Day so we were happy to see them. The event started with a short speech by Mrs Savita Patil who introduced us to the students.

Amita took the first session explaining what Fedora Women Day is and why we need more women in technology. She quoted very interesting examples of women who were doing great job in various field and explained about different fields in which they can contribute. It was really motivating, I am sure after this session many students must have made up their mind and decided the field based on their interest where they want to contribute.

After Amita, I took a session on Fedora QA, where I explained why QA is needed, what's the role and responsibilities of Fedora QA and how they can start with Fedora QA by explaining about Test Day, Bug Triage, Test cases and various other QA activities. As they were new to Fedora, I showed then how they can create FAS and Bugzilla account. I also covered about Fedora Badges in my talk and how they can be earned. By now they were more excited and want to earn those badges. I ended by giving some examples how they can start contributing in different fields.

Then Nikhil took a session on Fedora loves Python where he introduced the students to python. He talked about different libraries. Also he made the talk more interesting by showing some lives examples with demo. It was really great to do some exciting stuff using python.

After the talks it was the time for cake cutting. We all cut the cake and enjoyed the moment. We also get some queries from the student which we answered while having cake. Then Amita thanked the organizers and faculty for hosting this event and supporting us.

Around 4.30 we headed back to Pune. It was a great experience as I get to interact with the students and helped then to get started with Fedora. It was fun travelling with Amita and Nikhil, discussing various interesting things and our stories.

Looking forward for next year Fedora Women's Day to get more women contributor.

Wednesday, 12 September 2018

I attended Flock this year which is the Fedora Project's annual contributor-focused conference. This was my first Flock and it turned out be one of the best conferences I have attended so far.

It was a total 4 day event, where I got a chance to learn more about fedora, how things are changing in fedora and meet people face to face. There were many exciting things in Flock besides talks like hack fest, workshop and many activities like Yoga, Candy swap, Scavenger Hunt which made it more interesting.

Day-1:

The day started with the morning Yoga. Then the first keynote on "State of Fedora" where Fedora Project leaders talked about their objectives and editions. It was really helpful in understanding what are the new changes and how they are going to effect the community. There were lot of interesting talks from which I selected few, which were "RHEL,Fedora and CentOS: Solving the Pentose Triangle" by Josh Boyer and Brendan Conoboy. After this I attended a talk on "Desktop testing using dogtail and behave" by Petr Schindler as I want to know more about desktop testing and the framework he was using for this. After the talk we also had a great discussion about the framework, it was really great to know more about desktop testing.

After this there was Candy Swap event which was organised by Justin Flory, where people from different country bought candies , I also took some Indian candies and sweets to share with others.was a great event, got to taste lot of candies from various regions .

Day-2:

It started with keynote: "The Power of One:For the good of community" by Rebecca Fernandez which was really motivating as she talked about how we can bring change to the community which are good for others and how we can make a change in the community which we are wishing for. Then I attended a workshop on "Imposter Syndrome and Unconscious Bias Training" by Jona Azizaj, Justin Flory, Bee Padalkar, Amita Sharma as I want to understand how this can be identified and how we can overcome this. This was a interactive workshop where we identified are we suffering from this Syndrome or not and how we can manage it in our life and workplace.

Then I attended talk on "Fedora CI:Process, Progress and Infrastructure" by bstinson as I have strated contributing to CI and want to know more about the process. After this I attended a talk on "Scalable Fedora Design" by Abhishek Sharma where he shared his knowledge on design system and how Fedora can embraces a design system to ensure consistency and manage design debt.

The day ended with Scavenger Hunt which was organised in the Downtown(Dresden) where we got to know about some interesting facts and history of Dresden. It was really fun going around the city and completing the tasks given. Thanks to the organizers Dominika Bula,Brian Exelbierd , Jennifer Madriaga. I really enjoyed acting a scene from a movie where we in-acted a scene from a bollywood movie "Sholey".

Day-3:

We had hackfect on "i18n development and testing" postlunch. In morning I had a discussion with Lukas about OpenQA as I need to discuss some issues. He told me about how they are using it and his framework which he build to create needles. It was really great to know we can create needles and use them for OpenQA without using OpenQA needles editor with this framework. As I am using OpenQA for automation so it was a great help. We had great discussion about OpenQA which cleared many doubts of mine.
Post lunch we had our hack-fest, where we discussed about the following topics:

Upstream First Testing

Automation

New Features(Langpacks, Fonts etc)

It was great to have this hack fest, as now we were clear on many things and know how we can proceed further with Upstream First and CI initiative.

After this we went for Dinner at Roller Coaster Restaurant where everything came rolling to us, it was fun :P. There also I had discussion with lot of people. I met a guy from opensuse with whom I talked about OpenQA, also had some healthy conversation with Dodji about exercise, diet and health. It was a great evening spent well with great people.

Day-4:

On the last day most of my time I spent socializing with different people from different domains. I also attended lightening talk to gather more knowledge in less time. All the lightening talks were awesome. After this we had group photo followed by Wrap up Session.

The conference was really good, as I got to know people who can be bugged for specific issues and with whom I can discuss various issues. I also really enjoyed the various events at flock and stayed fit by attending the morning Yoga session . Thanks Suzanne Yeghiayan for taking these session.

Next day, we(Pravin, Sinny, Mike, Praveen, Sayan) went to Saxon Switzerland for a trek, it was great trek with you guys. Thanks Mike for taking us to such a beautiful place.

Monday, 20 August 2018

On 4th and 5th August I attended DevConf,in in Bengaluru as a speaker, which was a conference organised by RedHat to provide a platform to all local community participants to come together and share knowledge through technical talks, workshop, panel discussions, hackathon and other activities.

I arrived at Bangaluru airport on 3rd August early morning to avoid the terrific traffic and reached o hotel without facing much traffic. After reaching office I did my office work for that day.
In evening after having dinner, I did the registration in the hotel itself as registration was organised in hotel itself for speakers to save time n morning. It was really helpful, thanks Rahul and Ganesh for handling this process smoothly.

Day-1 (03-08-2018)
I had breakfast early morning ,then we all(speakers) left for the venue- Christ University. The event started with a traditional dance prepared by the students of Christ University which was really great. After that there was a keynote by Ric Wheeler on "Open source is better for companies/businesses, communities and developers" where he talked about evolution open source software from history to present day.

After attending the keynote I went for the QE track talks. QE track started with the talk by Anisha Narang on "Protactor 101s: Quick and Easy" where she introduced the audience to Protactor an end to end testing framework for Angular/AngularJS/ application.

Then it was the time for my talk in which I talked about "Robot Framework "which is an automation framework where i covered the basics to get the audience started with the framework supported by a short demo. It was really great to get so many questions and know people were really interested in knowing more about the framework. After my talk there was a short tea break, in which I went around the different booths to gain knowledge about the technology and products.

After this I attended talk by Anandprakash on "Best Strategies to test cloud and containers" where he discussed about the strategies which to should be followed based on the scenarios. Then in the same track Rohit talked about "QE to Full Stack Devops QE" where he showed how devops tools can be used by QE to enhance productivity. Then there was a lunch break.

After lunch break, I attended the talks in the QE track which were: Pains and Pleasure of Automatic Software testing and End to end testing made easy with Nightwatch. After there was a keynote by Karanbir Singh on "Open Source Won". This was the end was Day1.

Day-2(04-08-2018)
Second day started with the opening keynote from Christian Heimes on Freedom, Security and Responsibility, it was a great session. Then I attended another security talk by Huzaifa Sidhpurwala on "BlueBorne: Beware of Bluetooth".

After attending this talk I talked to people and shared the knowledge with them. I also attended talk on "Empathy maketh an Engineer" by Narendran, "Tricky task of i18n - Libration fonts" by Pravin Satpute where he talked about Liberation fonts different version and plans for Fedora-29. At the end there was a really interesting talk which I attended "Innovating Indian Education System using FOSS" by Bhavna Yadav where she talked about how we can make a difference if OSS is adapted at lowest level in education system. After this I attended the lightening talks, which were great. As the closing keynote was cancelled due to to some emergency. So after this we have a Thank you and Appreciation session where Rupali thanks the organizers, volunteers, Christ University and all the people involved in making this event a success.

This was a great event. Thanks to all the organizers and volunteers for making this event awesome.
Looking forward to next DevConf.in.

Monday, 2 July 2018

On June 30,2018 we had Fedora Pune meetup at RedHat office, along with Fedora 28 release celebration.

Pravin Satpute started the meetup by a welcome note and a quick introduction session. After this Parag presented a talk on Modularity. As most of the audience were new, so he started with very basic concepts like repository, package, compose, koji, bodhi , fedora build cycle. After making the people comfortable he started to talk about Modularity and explained the need and purpose to introduce this feature ie Too Fast vs Too Slow.

After this we had quick 10 mins break, where swags were distributed and everyone was happy to get swags :)

After the break the audience was divided in groups according to the interest as some want to know how they can create a FAS account, some want to know about how to earn badges and some about how we can contribute to Fedora.

Suprith and Ompragash lead the group who didn’t had a FAS account. They helped them to create FAS account and in the end everyone in the room was having a FAS account, which was their first step to contribute to fedora

Pravin took a session on how we can contribute to Fedora and earn badges. He explained about various badges, and how they can be earned by contributing to various projects and area.

Amita took a session how we contribute to Fedora by testing. She explained about the basics of testings and bugzilla.

Apart from these session Parag and Praveen were also having some interesting discussion around Fedora features, so some people joined them. After this we did cake cutting to celebrate Fedora-28 release and had snacks having discussions about Fedora.

It was a day well spent and great experience. Looking forward to next meetup.